Restrictions on Christian Capitalists

Can a Christian be a successful capitalist? Jesus said it would be impossible, or at least very hard, so hard that it’s not worth the bother. Perhaps he was exaggerating a bit in the passage above; Jesus used hyperbole now and then in order to shout across the ages.^* But even if so, why was he shouting? I have already proposed several theories:

• Wealth is not hard evidence of divine favor.
• Beginning Christians should take a break from serious economic activity in order to master scripture and turn Christian living into a habit.
• It may even help for Christians to live communally for a time to build up spiritual muscles.
• If you give up wealth and/or social status upon joining the Church, you are likely to stick with the faith even when the initial zeal wears off.
• Christian giving should not wait until retirement. You should give as you build wealth.

But there is more, more that comes from the Old Testament. Consider the passages below:

These passages seem to condemn riches, but consider these passages from the same book:

The book of Proverbs is filled with wealth building insights. It was compiled by a very rich man (Solomon). The distinction between righteous wealth and filthy lucre goes way back.

Here in the West Christians are not persecuted. Until recently, Christians got to be the persecutors. So building wealth as a Christian is easier than it was two millennia ago. But there are still restrictions. Exactly how many restrictions I cannot say with authority. If Christians are to live under the Law and under further commandments given in the New Testament, then the aspiring Christian capitalist does indeed strive under quite a few handicaps. I will list quite a few below. I hope this list is overly picky, for I cannot claim to live up to all its standards.

And just as I wrestle with the idea of Christians avoiding wealth getting in general vs. having something to give and having some clout in society, I wonder about the net benefit of strictly following all the potential restrictions below. If Christian capitalists handicap themselves severely, then wealth and power accrue to the ungodly. We may yet see a return to the practice of persecuting Christians…

Vice and the Entertainment Industry

Let us start with the obvious: Christians shouldn’t be running whorehouses or “gentlemen’s clubs,” nor should they go into the pornography business. Duh.

But what about a Christian owner of a convenience store or grocery store: should one stock the almost-porn “lad’s magazines?” How about the hot rod magazines with the scantily clad models on the covers? How about muscle magazines? What of fashion/health magazines which give tips on how to get laid? What of Cosmopolitan?

What if you own a television station or cable channel? Can you run programming which glorifies extramarital sexual activities? Can you run soap operas? James Bond movies? And what could you stock if you owned a video rental store?

To what degree could you sell intoxicants? Wine and beer were definitely allowed under Biblical Law within reason. There were even drink offerings [Exodus 29:40], so you can treat your body as a temple [1 Corinthians 19] and still have a drink. But what about marijuana? Is that a “strange incense” [Exodus 30:9]? How about tobacco? And what of hallucinogens? Does dealing in LSD or magic mushrooms constitute sorcery?

Then there is gambling. I know of no direct prohibition on gambling in the Bible, but I can think of some indirect admonitions which would prelude running a fully optimized gambling establishment. Run a casino with mind-numbing sensory overload, lots of alcohol, and no closing time, and you are preying on the weak of will. Run advertisements featuring money showering down on the lucky and you can end up preying on the stupid.

I hope some of the restrictions above are overkill. But if they are not, getting rich in the entertainment industry is indeed a challenge for a Christian. On the other hand, if Christians stay out of the entertainment industry or stick to overtly religious bookstores and TV channels, then the entertainment industry is left in the hand of others. Look around to see the results.

(This is the theme I keep coming back to in this series: if Christians handicap themselves too much in the name of spiritual purity, then even the once-Christian nations of the earth are placed in the control of non-Christian governments and other institutions. Where does the balance point lie between effective action and spiritual purity?)

An Inconvenient Sabbath

What happens when you operate a retail business six days a week in a society with no blue laws, and your competitors are operating seven days a week? Expect some lost revenue. That said, some prominent Christian owned chains such as Chick Fil’A do just that and manage to prosper.

But how about closing down on the actual Biblical Sabbath? The Sabbath runs from Friday at sunset to Saturday at sunset. This is inconvenient indeed if you want to run a retail business. Saturday is a peak shopping day. Friday night is one of the busiest times for dining out and entertainment.

And what about running a utility: a power company, a phone company, or Internet service? What of gas stations? If you get really really picky on this, you either exclude yourself certain businesses or cause a great deal of inconvenience for others. (Then again, if we as a society took the Sabbath seriously, we would already have alternative energy, and would be considerably more prepared to deal with assorted disruptions…)

Money Lending

Can a Christian be a banker? Biblical Law forbade the charging of interest to fellow Hebrews, but the Bible also encouraged lending at interest to foreigners. Should Christians follow this example?

This is a tricky conundrum that the Christian world has wrestled with for millennia. Credit is incredibly useful. And since we have inflation and easy bankruptcy, any kind of money lending without interest contains a major gift component. Christians should make such gifts to the poor, of course. But what about loans to successful businesses? What about home mortgages to the upper middle class? What of credit cards?

In these days of the income tax, civil asset forfeiture, and the surveillance state, doing business in cash is effectively illegal in the United States. Keep your business below the radar or use the interest-based financial system is the law of the land. (Are such things the fulfillment of the Number of the Beast prophecy? I don’t know.)

Even a more reasonable extrapolation of these ancient laws runs into trouble. Suppose you interpret the admonition as being merely against high interest loans to the poor. (Poverty makes one a bad credit risk, thus requiring high interest to offset those who fail to pay. But the high interest rates lead to failure to pay…It’s a vicious cycle.) Running a rent-to-own store selling luxury goods is definitely out. Such businesses encourage the poor to buy what they clearly cannot afford at prices higher than the better off pay (once you figure in interest). In our wealthy society there is a bounty of used furniture, electronics, and automobiles available.

Payday lending is another questionable business. But note the trade-offs! Legal payday lenders put loan sharks out of business. And if this business is dominated by the truly unethical, would not the poor be better off if someone better entered the business?

Maybe we need some non-profits offering credit to the poor at a loss. Or maybe we need some for profit Christian businesses to compete against the sleazier lenders to offer less-bad deals. I don’t know.

Honest Business Dealings

Proverbs, a book compiled by the richest person in the Bible, has many admonitions against dishonesty in the course of business – and life in general. And this is a book containing many wealth-building tips, so Christians who aspire to wealth should play double-plus attention to this restriction.

On the upside, being honest frequently pays. Not only does blatantly dishonest dealing get you in trouble with the law, a bad reputation can cost more than the benefits of cheating.

I said frequently, not always. There are many sneaky borderline dishonest business practices which do pay well, most of which are legal as long as they meet certain technical requirements. Let us consider a few:

• Brand manipulation. Build a brand making a very high quality product. Then stealthily lower the quality. Reap profits!
• High pressure sales. Don’t just show off the benefits of your product. Play a host of mind games to manipulate your customers/victims into buying your product whether it is appropriate for them or not. This is a very common procedure in the auto sales business.
• Deceptive junk mail covers. I regularly get official looking mail that looks like a bill or a government document that is actually a sales pitch in disguise. Then there are the auto dealers which send out what look like scratch and win sweepstakes but if you very, very, very carefully read the fine print, you find that a winning number isn’t.
• False urgency. Offer ends in 24 hours! See the timer ticking (on web sites). Usually, the exact same offer comes back immediately afterwards.
• Fake review sites. Affiliate marketing is not inherently dishonest, but making ad copy which looks like an objective review is questionable without very visible disclaimers. And it is definitely dishonest if you haven’t tried the product and/or the review does not match your own experience with it. (And yes, the FTC is cracking down on some of the worse abuses here.)
• Black/grey hat SEO. Is fooling the search engines fraud? (Confession: I have done some grey hat tricks at times and profited. After reading Proverbs recently, I’m beginning to clean up my act.)
• Gambling disguised as auctions. There is/was a site which advertised fancy electronics for pennies on the dollar. The catch was that it is/was an auction site where you pay what you bid even if you don’t win.
• Hidden prices/conditions. For many services, such as phone, Internet, and financial services, the advertised price deviates substantially from what you have to pay after all the miscellaneous charges are thrown in. The government has cracked down on some of these games, but by no means all.
• Milking the government for contracts, subsidies and/or special tax breaks. Much of what the government does is for the public interest, but quite a bit of government spending and tax breaks are really just gifts to the politically connected – crime made legal. Should you get your “fair share?”

Wow! This is a big list, and it is not complete. Here is the conundrum: if your competitors are doing these things to the point where you cannot compete and stay in business, should you quit? Or is it sufficient to simply set a less bad standard? Personal example: if a crappy made for AdSense site has spammed its way to the top of the search engine results, just how evil is it to use similar techniques to push a more legit page to displace it? I have gone back and forth on that one.

Land Accumulation

If you have land or capital, you can rent either out, and use the money to buy more. This produces a feedback loop that separates the rich from the rest of us – including the not so productive rich. For capital, there is a societal benefit: when capital accumulates the marginal return drops – a greater share goes to labor.

Land, on the other hand, is largely fixed. The Bible makes this distinction with the Jubilee Laws. When Canaan was conquered, the Hebrews divided up the farmland roughly equally. Your share could not be sold in perpetuity. You could rent your share out, but upon the year of Jubilee, it reverted to you or your descendants. This prevented a parasitic aristocracy from arising.

Now here is the question: to what extent can Christians make money as landlords? Is buying up mass quantities of farmland permissible?

Note that land within walled cities could be sold outright. I assume this is because the capital component was high compared to the raw land component. So I assume that some kinds of real estate speculation are permissible. If you build a grocery store or movie theater and rent out the surrounding land, much of the rental value of that land is due to the traffic you generate from said store or theater.

The value of farmland, on the other hand, is largely due to climate, slope, etc. That is, God created value. On the other hand, the U.S. is not the Holy Land [see Leviticus 25:23]…

Worker Exploitation

The market for labor is a bit weird. Since the marginal value of a dollar vs. an hour of leisure goes down as you get wealthier as a rule, you often have to motivate high dollar workers with intrinsic job satisfaction, pleasant working conditions, etc. For low paid workers in the absence of a welfare system, each dollar is worth time and even outright unpleasantness. The lower the pay, the more value each dollar is. In other words, lower pay can result in a greater supply of labor!

This is a recipe for exploiting low-wage workers. History bears this out.

It also means that various labor protections, minimum wages, etc. can sometimes work without creating unemployment.

But the conservative counter-argument is worth remembering: if you push wages and/or benefits above productivity, then layoffs will occur. If you treat employers as criminals or as branches of the welfare state, then you discourage people from employing.

There is a balance somewhere, but it’s not always easy to find.

Exactly what the government laws should be regarding labor is a subject for a future series. I would note that we do have laws in effect which cut down the worse abuses. The welfare system keeps people from being in extreme desperation for work. Overtime laws reduce the ability to exploit the backward bending supply curve for labor. (But note that mandating per employee overhead such as health insurance for all full time workers creates an incentive to make full time workers do overtime. Oops!) So perhaps we can partially disregard this admonition a defer some of the responsibility to the government.

But still, let us look at some other Biblical commandments regarding labor and decide if there are any takeaways for modern Christian capitalists in developed countries.

Bait and Switch Pay Rate

In The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart’s character starts out as a bum. Then he gets hired to work for a period of time. He gets fed, but his employer cannot pay monetary wages until after the work is done and he goes to the bank – whereupon he disappears. Alas, variations on this scam are all too common, especially in poorer parts of the world. Read Mother Jones for examples. Throw in high setup costs, such as moving to another country, and you have a recipe for borderline slave labor.

(This may be the “pay you have held back” that St. James was referring to in Verse 4 above. The King James Version of this verse includes the word fraud. But he might have been making a more general statement here if the other translations I have read are correct.)

The Bible had a brute force check on such abuse: employers were to pay at the end of the day. Yes, an employer might get away with stealing a day’s labor, under such a system, but that’s a cap on a particularly evil form of abuse.

Here in the developed world, such blatant abuses are rare, but variations on the theme still occur. Can a Christian capitalist do any of the following:

• Run a business where employees work mainly for a “prize” which only some get?
• Run a business using rotating interns for labor?
• Stretch entry level wages until employees balk or quit?

Don’t get me wrong. Experience can be valuable, and experienced employees can be several times as productive as entry level in many fields. Giving someone a chance by offering a low starting wage to see how he works out is a good thing. But if it only takes six months to get up to speed, requiring five+ years of seniority to get a decent wage maybe isn’t so fair. For many occupations, productivity as a function of experience looks something like this:

Yet salaries often look more like this:

If you believe in traditional family values, make pay better match productivity for such jobs. The old 1950s ideal of the husband bringing home the paycheck while the wife takes care of the house and children requires that young men be able to earn enough to support a family. Our current system of astronomical college costs, undue requirements for college, and seniority-based wages tell the young to put off marriage and family – just screw around for a decade and then get married. Either that, or require both parents to work and let grandparents and/or daycare facilities raise the kids.

(As for saving for retirement, it makes perfectly good sense for both members of a couple to work after the kids have grown up.)

Reasonable Work Hours

OK, we don’t have slavery (prison population excepted), but we do have quite a few free workers tasked to work all sorts of family-unfriendly hours. Also bad: many retail establishments now dynamically schedule workers to match customer flow. This is quite convenient for consumers, but can be a nightmare for those with children. (See this Pacific Standard article.)

Now go back and reconsider the earlier passage about paying when the sun sets. It implies that work ends when the sun sets as well. True, the passage was written for a civilization which didn’t have anything better than oil lamps for working at night, so I might be reading too much into it. But throw in the Sabbath laws, and I dare say that the spirit of the Law does hint at limiting work hours to something reasonable.

Today, some work does require shiftwork. And there are people who enjoy working weird hours (myself included). So I cannot derive any blanket admonition here. But it’s something to think about.

In Conclusion

I do not know how many of the above constraints apply to modern Christians. If all of them, then becoming rich as a Christian would be difficult indeed. But as I keep saying, if all sincere Christians avoid serious monetary success, then the institutions of our society fall into the hands of non Christians. So either Christians need to get very good at pooling their money to fund institutions without the help of the rich, or they need to allow some to do some serious wealth building.

One possibility is to look at the B Corporation movement for inspiration. When it comes to worker exploitation, environmental impact, moral compromises, etc. there is generally a profitability curve that resembles the Laffer Curve for taxes. Consider wages and working conditions. If you are a jerk of a boss, you can get work out of your employees while scrimping on the pay and benefits. But at some point strikes, turnover, and/or employee disloyalty take a toll – especially in modern welfare states where the safety net dampens the effect of the backward-bending supply curve for labor. On the other hand, if you try to create a great place to work, your extra employee costs can be offset by improved loyalty, reduced turnover, etc. But there is a limit. Eventually, the marginal benefits of employee are offset by the marginal costs of employee benefits. We get a curve like this:

I could draw a similar curve for environmental impact. A green company gets some extra customer loyalty and less harassment by federal bureaucrats, etc. But solar power, organic food and so forth are still expensive.

I could do the same for honesty in sales pitches. A truly honest company will get kudos from consumer groups, and good reviews will offset some of the sales lost by those who assume your sales pitch has to include some dishonest spin since that is the norm.

And the same goes for morals. You can run a convenience store without selling porn. And quality Christian themed/compatible movies sell very well these days given how Hollywood is under producing such.

Finding the maximum of any of these curves is a challenge. I think it is fair to say that Christian businesses should aspire to err on the right side of the maxima. Maybe we cannot be perfect and do profitable business, but we can pull things toward the better.

Whether that suffices is an exercise I leave to the reader.